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Serbia Moves Tanks to Croatia Border

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Serbia moved 27 tanks toward its border with Croatia today, aggravating military tensions in the region that are making the United Nations peacekeeping mission here look increasingly threatened.

European Union military monitors said they saw tanks of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav Army moving westward from Novi Sad in Serbia toward the border. The maneuver appeared to be a show of force aimed at deterring the buoyant Croatian Army from attacking Serbian-occupied land around Vukovar in eastern Croatia.

"The tanks are moving in daylight, so this looks like a warning," said Lieut. Col. Walt Natcynczyk, a United Nations military spokesman. In general, armored units move at night when preparing for an offensive.

Having overrun a Serbian enclave on Monday and Tuesday in western Slavonia in Croatia, the Croatian Army has been building up artillery and other war materiel around the eastern town of Osijek.

Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, did not deploy any forces to assist the 15,000 Serbs of western Slavonia. But he would be almost certain to dispatch his army to the defense of eastern Slavonia, a part of Croatia that the Belgrade Government would like to annex because of its substantial oil reserves, its rich farmland and its position adjacent to Serbia itself.

Kirsten Haupt, a United Nations spokeswoman in the eastern Slavonian Serbian enclave, said thousands of Serbian civilians had been evacuated from villages east of Osijek, including Darda, Sarvas and Bilje. They were loaded onto trucks and taken toward Serbia as Croatia moved about 300 troops into a United Nations buffer zone over the Drava River.

The activity reflects the potentially explosive tensions that have arisen from Croatia's onslaught in western Slavonia. Over 5,000 of the pocket's 15,000 Serbs fled into Serbian-held territory in northern Bosnia. At least another 1,500 have been detained, many are in hiding and an unknown number is dead or missing. Some women and children have remained in their homes.

From the accounts of refugees, it seems many Serbs perished in heavy Croatian tank, artillery and aerial bombardments on Monday and Tuesday as they tried to flee southward toward the Sava River bridge into Bosnia. The estimate of 450 Serbian dead given by Gojko Susak, the Croatian Defense Minister, appears conservative.

What is clear is that the United Nations presence in western Slavonia, intended to protect the area and preserve cease-fire lines, was swept aside as the Croatian Army moved in. Seldom has the hapless position of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the midst of the Yugoslav wars been more apparent than over the past week.

At the camp of a platoon of Nepalese United Nations soldiers near the Croatian town of Nova Gradiska, everything lay in ruins this week. The camp, at the eastern entrance to what used to be the Serbian enclave of western Slavonia, was ransacked by marauding Croatian soldiers on Tuesday night.

"I was ordered by my commander to leave here on Tuesday, because the situation was considered too dangerous," said Maj. Janaradan Malla. "The Croats came on Tuesday night and took our machine guns, our personal belongings and about 25,000 dollars in cash belonging to my soldiers."

On the ground, the pillows, sleeping bags, clothes, ripped-up mail and other possessions of the Nepalese soldiers lay in disarray. Soldiers gazed gloomily at the ransacked containers in which they used to sleep, and some seemed close to tears.

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"They do not respect our United Nations flag, so what can we do?" Major Malla said, surveying the mayhem. "Our hands are tied. We're not here to fight, and there's a war going on. If somebody gives me an order, I can defend myself, but that's not what happens here. It looks to me like it's time to go home to Katmandu."

The pillaging of the camp reflects the anger that has mounted steadily among Croats over the past four years as the United Nations has appeared increasingly to act as a buffer for the Serbs occupying large areas of the country.

In fact, the United Nations has also provided a buffer behind which the Croatian Army has successfully reorganized, acquiring training and a lot of weaponry. That was brought into sharp focus by a victory this week that also revealed the limitations of the overstretched Serbs.

This improvement and Croatia's evident readiness to use force to get its land back in turn poses a basic question for the United Nations, some of the peacekeepers say: Given that wars generally end when one side is victorious and the other defeated, why not leave and allow the two sides to fight it out?

Major Malla has no doubt that this is now the right course. "I've been told to man my checkpoint," he said, sitting at the ruined camp drinking tea. "But in reality I don't think there will ever be a checkpoint here again. What is the point now the Croats have taken over?"

A senior United Nations official who requested anonymity said the Croatian offensive "probably signified the end of the mission to Croatia." Observation posts, weapons, armored personnel carriers, jeeps and other equipment throughout the country are being contemptuously seized by Croatian and Serbian forces alike.

Responding to the larceny, the five major powers that form the so-called "contact group" of mediators warned this week "against any attempt to change by force the situation in the deployment zones of the United Nations peacekeeping force."

Even by the standards of Balkan diplomatic parlance, it was viewed as an extraordinary statement illustrating how radically the situation has changed. Croatia has, through force of arms, taken back western Slavonia, an occupied region of the country, and does not intend to return it to the United Nations or anyone else.

By his action, Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian President, has sent a signal that he has little or no use for the United Nations, whose mandate is considered tenable only if diplomatic, rather than military, avenues are used to resolve the conflict in Croatia and Bosnia.

United Nations officials here are aware of that, but would face enormous problems if they decided to withdraw. The Serbs, who still hold other parts of Croatia that they call the Krajina, would probably take United Nations soldiers hostage if they tried to leave.

The United Nations mission in Bosnia depends on the one in Croatia for virtually all its logistics. Evacuating the whole force of more than 30,000 soldiers in Croatia and Bosnia would be a massive operation requiring NATO and American involvement.

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 1995, on Page 1001012 of the National edition with the headline: Serbia Moves Tanks to Croatia Border. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe